Building Core Animal Science Knowledge through Project-Based Study: Name that Tool

NACTA Journal, Mar 2007 by Robinson, Frank E, Wuetherick, Brad, Wolanski, Nicholas, Greenwood, Sabrina

Abstract

The Boyer Commission (1998) called on universities to 'reinvent' undergraduate programs and delivery with the objective to engage students in the process of inquiry, beginning in the freshman year. It also called on universities to develop a sense of community amongst the student population to improve the overall learning environment for students inside and outside of the classroom. At the University of Alberta this call to change the learning environment at the introductory level has been a focal point of recent changes to the introductory "Animal Science 200" class taught within the Faculty of Agriculture, Forestry and Home Economics. The teaching team has implemented a project-based learning experience, called 'Name that Tool,' that engages students in the inquiry process, while also practicing their oral and written communication skills. It was intended that this experience would result in a more involved and engaged student population with demonstrated improvements in confidence, ability, and overall satisfaction. After this project, the differences in knowledge base between urban and rural backgrounds should be less noticeable, as all students have a stronger foundation on which to build new knowledge.

Introduction

One of the most challenging, and most important, issues raised by the Boyer Commission (1998) in the United States was to create an inquiry-based first year experience to set the stage for a research-based undergraduate education. The difficulty lies in the fact that "the freshman year ... must be the bridge between high school... on the one side and the more open and more independent world of the research university on the other, and it must excite the student by the wealth, diversity, scale, and scope of what lies ahead" (Boyer Commission, 1998). Many disciplines continue to struggle with the need to balance the content that their disciplinary tradition dictates is necessary to ground students in that particular discipline with the need to make students more engaged in the inquiry process that we increasingly know is beneficial to students' learning.

Agricultural education, in both Canada and the United States, has a history of experiential, handson, active learning, which is at the core of what the Boyer Commission aspires towards in a 'reinvented' undergraduate education. The issue has been examined both at the secondary and higher education levels within agriculture (Parr and Edwards, 2004; Knoblach, 2003). This form of active, experiential learning has been called a constructivedevelopmental pedagogy, the principles of which are to validate students as "knowers," to situate learning in the students' experience and to conceive of learning as mutually constructing knowledge (Baxter Magolda, 1999). Recently, it has been described by researchers in the UK as moving students beyond a point of 'educational bulimia' where they memorize content knowledge and regurgitate it for an exam prior to wiping it from their memory (Lea et al., 2003). These principles are at the core of a curriculum change in an introductory animal science class at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

Building in project-based learning opportunities, which meet these principles, in first-year courses, is challenging as these classes are typically large, the students may have little or no background knowledge, and the student population can be very heterogeneous. This paper describes a learning opportunity that to date has been offered to three cohorts of students in an introductory animal science class. The overall objective of this project, from a content perspective, is to establish a diverse knowledge base in all students so that they develop a base to build new course material on. This project is also designed to reduce the variation in student background level, as urban students were exposed to a wide array of novel agricultural objects that some rural students would already be knowledgeable about. It is also designed to challenge rural students as some objects are selected from somewhat obscure applications. The primary objective from a process perspective is to provide entry level students with the opportunity for projectbased learning. It is intended that students would become sufficiently familiar with the objects to lead class discussion. This exercise is also planned to provide the opportunity for acquiring skills in oral communication and poster presentations. The focus on helping students acquire skills that are critical for their future academic study, including critical thinking and analysis skills, communication skills, and writing skills, is a fundamental component of what the Boyer Commission intended through its emphasis on an inquiry-based learning environment (Boyer Commission, 1998). A further objective of the course is to build on the Boyer Commission recommendation of "building community" through facilitating student discussion of relevant problems inside and outside of the classroom environment.